128 
M WILSON. 
clean and condemned in totality as unfit for human food. 
Amongst these diseases there is none more clearly described 
than the disease that is to-day known as tuberculosis. 
It must certainly seem strange that what has been consid¬ 
ered lor ages as dangerous by one sect of people, should have 
been and should continue to be entirely indifferent to another 
sect of people. This is not merely a question of religious 
rites ; the rabbis of former ages were, like their colleagues 
in profession, the monks, known to possess great proficiency 
in medicine. They were, as is well shown in their writings, 
learned in anatomy and pathology, and we have every reason 
to assume that the rules concerning disease in the bodies of 
animals, and the prohibition of these for consumption, must 
have been founded on the experience that the consumption 
of the flesh of such animals is fraught with danger. If there 
is one disease about which proof is definite and absolute that 
it is a disease communicable from animal to animal by inocu¬ 
lation and by ingestion ; if there is a disease about which 
with precision it has been shown that it is caused by a well 
characterized specific organism, the tubercle bacillus—that 
disease is tuberculosis. 
No one who has any right to have an opinion about the 
matter doubts that be it tuberculosis in cattle or be it tuber¬ 
culosis in human beings, we are dealing with one and the 
same disease, due to the same cause, viz., the tubercle bacil¬ 
lus. It matters not whether the tubercle bacillus be taken 
from a scrofulous gland (which is merely tuberculosis local¬ 
ized in certain glands), or from a tubercle in the lung in gen¬ 
eral tuberculosis, the result of inoculation in animals is the 
production of general tuberculosis. Although the direct ex¬ 
perimental proof that bovine tuberculosis is directly trans¬ 
missible to the human subject by ingestion, is for obvious 
reasons impossible, there are a good many facts going to 
show that such is very probably the case. 
In the first place there is the experimental fact that ani¬ 
mals susceptible to tuberculosis contract the disease when 
the bacilli in whatever form are introduced into their diges¬ 
tive tract; again, we have cases of tubercular meningitis in 
